Backing up photos
A year ago I wrote about backing up photos. And there I mentioned the SyncToy application, that I use to locally backup my photos to my Synology file-server. And today I will go a bit more about how to use Synctoy.
What is SyncToy? SyncToy is a free application from Microsoft (can be downloaded here), that is used to synchronize folders. It’s not automatic, so you have to run it yourself. But if you are as I am, and like to be fully in control, you will like it. It’s very simple to use and worked flawlessly for me during the two years I have been using it.
It’s much better than just copying files to a new location, as it detects changes, deleted files, new folder and similar and corrects that all for you while synchronizing.
Using SyncToy to locally backup photos
So how do one use it? First, decide on a folder you want to backup. Then, decide where you want to back it up too. So either a file-server, external drive or a second drive in your PC. In my case it’s a file-server, that is attached as a mapped network drive in my PC.
Continue by creating a folder pair with Create folder pair button. You can see in the screenshots, I have multiple, split based on whats in the folder.
Choose the folders, choose the type of synchronization, add a name to the pair and confirm. Since it’s a backup, use Echo as synchronization method. This will mirror you computer folder onto the backup folder, but not the other way around. So if you delete a file from your computer, and sync, it will be deleted also from the backup. Of course if you delete it accidentally, don’t sync, and just copy the file from the backup :)
Once the folder pair is done, you can just click on Run to sync them. But I prefer to first hit on Preview, that will list all the changes it will perform first. Like this I can quickly see what it will do. Once that is shown, I hit Run to finish the Sync.
Now just run this each time you want to run a backup and you are done.
